


The Voice in the Trees

by apollonious



Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: F/F, Femslash February
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 08:47:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22967155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollonious/pseuds/apollonious
Summary: Lucy follows a song in the woods.
Relationships: Lucy Pevensie/Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 16





	The Voice in the Trees

**Author's Note:**

> All references to Greek poetry are from Anne Carson's translation of Sappho, released in 2002. Because naturally Susan would have that version at school.

When she’s sixteen, Lucy takes to wandering, roaming the woods and valleys of Narnia for weeks at a time. She’s restless, though she couldn’t quite tell you why, and the only thing that seems to relieve the pressure that builds up inside her at court is walking, alone, through her land. 

Peter tells her to be careful, and more than once she suspects Edmund has followed her, but she’s perfectly safe. Nothing in the woods between Cair Paravel and Beaversdam would dare hurt her, or even want to, and if something ever tried to—well, there’s a reason her soubriquet is “the Valiant.” 

As the summer wears on, they seem to realize that nothing’s going to happen to her, and they both relax a little. Slowly, the castle gets used to it too. Whenever Lucy is spotted within its walls, she’s almost always on her way to the library or the map room, where she sits for hours, often late into the night, plotting out her next adventure. She’ll look up as her candle gutters to see a mug of mulled cider, just beyond the area where she might accidentally knock it over, left by a servant whom she’d thought had just been in there to clean. This happens several times before she manages to look up just at the right time and smile at the young faun girl, who blushes, bobs her head, and rushes off.

Before long, though, she stops needing maps, as her feet learn the hills and streams better than any chart could teach her. 

It’s as she’s wondering through the woods not terribly far from the Stone Table that she hears the song for the first time.

It doesn’t have a melody, exactly, not like she’s used to, and the throat singing it definitely isn’t human. But she’s used to that; she’s seen so few humans in the last years that she’d be surprised to hear one. Especially in these woods.

What she’s not used to is the effect the music has on her, hooking into her heart and belly and pulling her along inexorably. It’s like the call of the sirens she read about back in school, only she’s not a sailor. And she doesn’t think this song is drawing her to her destruction. 

She follows the music, bending her ear and padding slowly on the soles of her well-worn boots, making no more noise than the wind between the trees. But all the same, the song cuts off in a sharp gasp, and there’s a rustle of something like leaves.

Lucy runs in the direction the music was coming from, panting as she reaches a clearing. There’s a pond in the center, and beside the pond is a tree with papery bark, peppered with patterns like eyes. Its leaves, far above her head, are pale green, and they rustle against the blue sky in a breeze that doesn’t quite reach Lucy. 

“Hello?” Lucy calls. “You can come out. You don’t need to be afraid.”

But nothing does come out. She stands there, beside the pond and the tree, so still she’s barely breathing, for a long time, until the golden light pouring down between the branches starts to fade. 

“I’m going now,” she says, breaking the silence that has fallen over the forest. “But I’ll come back in… two weeks. If you’d like to talk, start singing when I get here. I do love your song.”

And Lucy does as she says she’s going to, because that’s the sort of girl she is, even after spending years with very few people to answer to. She keeps walking, giving the Stone Table a wide berth, and though she thinks she hears something following her through the woods, she doesn’t turn to look behind her. Whatever it is, it doesn’t sound dangerous.

She doesn’t stop walking until darkness has well and truly fallen. She finds a patch of soft earth beneath a tree and builds a small fire with fallen twigs and her little tinder-box, eating and then stamping the fire out before falling asleep to the sound of the trees whispering above her head—not in words she can understand, of course, but by now she’s learned to tell the difference between tree-speech and ordinary wind.

She has to change her plans just slightly to keep her appointment at the clearing with the pond, and when she gets back to Cair Paravel sooner than she said she was going to, Peter is slightly taken aback, though pleased. 

“Sorry, I can’t stay,” she says. “I’m leaving again tomorrow morning.”

Peter sighs, but they both know there’s no point in arguing. His baby sister has always been wild, and living in Narnia has only made her more so. Trying to constrain that wildness when it doesn’t want to be contained will only end in disappointment.

“All right, then,” he says. “Just be safe. And don’t let Susan catch you looking like that.”

“Looking like what?” Lucy asks, laughing, but she knows what he means. She’s wearing trousers tucked into her boots, and the doublet she has on over a chemise that she’s been wearing for days is travel-stained and spotted with rain. Her hair, wound around her head in what is nominally a braid, is tangled and so full of flyaways that’s it’s a wonder the braid is still there. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll clean up before dinner.”

And when she leaves the castle the next morning, she makes sure she has a hairbrush in her pack.

It’s noon on the appointed day when she reaches the span of woods near the Stone Table that contains the clearing with the pond and the tree. At once, almost as she is crossing the imperceptible border between this patch of forest and the next, she hears the singing again. It pulls on her the same way it did before, making her heart skip.

Lucy grins, running lightly between the trees to the clearing. The pond is still there, glittering in the noon sun, but the tree, which she learned in a quick search through the library is called an Aspen, has vanished. She stops, looking around in confusion, and the singing stops, only to be replaced by musical laughter like the tinkling of little bells. She turns toward the laughter and sees a girl stepping out from behind a tree, her eyes meeting Lucy’s as she smiles. 

_Arms like roses,_ Lucy thinks absurdly, quoting to herself from a book of Greek poems Susan had read at school and she had squirreled away when Susan returned, not sure why at the time the words had latched onto her so, though of course the girl’s arms are nothing like roses. They’re paper-white, just like her bark. Her skin is patterned with the same eye-like impressions she has as a tree; her fingers are long and twig-like; her hair, pale green and formed from small, rounded leaves, is starting to go yellow at the edges as autumn approaches. Her real eyes, liquid and dark, are on Lucy.

 _Tongue breaks._

And so it is now: Lucy finds she cannot speak, cannot move, can hardly breathe as this glorious creation walks slowly along the edge of the pond toward her. The way the light moves on her face is entrancing; Lucy cannot look away.

The tree-girl stops a few feet in front of her, and Lucy finds her voice again. “Hello,” she says softly.

The girl gives a tinkling laugh and does what would be called a curtsy if she were human, and Lucy is stunned, because why on Earth is this girl curtsying to her?

The Aspen reaches out and brushes her fingers along the sleeve of Lucy’s doublet, tugging just slightly at the fabric at the elbow. Realizing what she wants, and thinking it’s only fair, since the Aspen has shed her own protective layer, Lucy slowly undoes the front of the doublet, revealing the lacy chemise beneath. The Aspen reaches out, stilling her fingers between the two sides of the jacket, and when Lucy nods, she closes the distance to Lucy’s stomach, brushing up from her navel toward her breasts, sending shivers up Lucy’s spine.

 _Thin fire racing under skin,_ Lucy thinks, though of course she can’t say that, not to a girl whose skin is bark and whose flesh is wood. But she reaches out and caresses the Aspen’s shoulder with just her fingertips, tracing along to the place where her collarbone meets her neck. The Aspen’s hand slides around under the doublet so that she is holding Lucy around the waist, and she bends her head toward Lucy’s. 

Lucy closes the distance, her own warm lips brushing the tree-girl’s. They are smooth rather than soft, though they have some give to them, and the girl tastes of warm earth and streamwater, cool and clear and sparkling. 

When she pulls away, Lucy knows she’s blushing, and a pale chartreuse has infused the Aspen’s cheeks as well.

 _Longing floats around you._ And so it does.

“What is your name?” Lucy asks, and the Aspen bends to whisper something in her ear. It’s beautiful, and perfect, and Lucy thinks she could probably say it if she tried hard enough, but it’s also sacred, and secret, and she thinks she’ll let it stay inside her. 

Lucy sheds the rest of her clothes, letting her sun-streaked hair down last of all, and stands there in the afternoon sun, bare as the tree-girl before her. 

_I want,_ she thinks, and it is clear that the Aspen thinks the same, because she steps toward Lucy and puts her hand on the same place on her back as before. Lucy loops her arms around the tree-girl’s neck, her hands brushing through the Aspen’s leaf-hair in a way that makes them both shiver, and together they sink onto the soft forest floor, there beside the pond. 

For the rest of the summer, Lucy never spends more than a night at Cair Paravel. Her siblings all question her on this, and on the good mood she always seems to be in, but she only smiles and shrugs on her way back out the castle door. 

She has no need for a tent, or for shelter of any kind, for she sleeps in the Aspen’s arms, under her unblinking gaze, and when a storm comes that means the Aspen needs to have her roots down, Lucy sleeps beneath her boughs, wrapped in her cloak. 

She may be imagining things, she knows that, but part of her thinks she is starting to understand the tree-speech. Not anything extensive, of course, but there is a sound repeated whenever she appears that she slowly realizes is the trees’ name for her.

Slowly, autumn arrives in earnest, and the Aspen’s hair changes from rich, pale green to golden yellow more lustrous than the treasures of Cair Paravel. She grows tired, Lucy sees, as winter approaches, and she grows to understand that this is when the tree-girl sleeps—now, in the cold months of the year. One day, as she is kissing the Aspen goodbye, she hesitates for a second and then asks, “Should I stay there this time?”

After a moment, the Aspen nods. 

“I’ll be back next spring,” Lucy promises. “As soon as I see the first snowdrops, I’ll come to you.”

Smiling, the Aspen nods again, and folds Lucy into an embrace at once more rigid and more caring than any she has known before. 

When Lucy returns to the home she shares with her brothers and sister, she is not worried that she will return to the same unrelievable pressure as before.

There’s always next spring, after all.

* * *

Lucy returns the next spring, and the spring after that, for years, until she doesn’t. When she finally comes back, it has been a thousand years.

She fears the worst—she expects the worst, knowing that individual Aspens only live for a century or two—but she can’t bring herself to stay away, knowing too that Aspens form colonies of hundreds and thousands of trees that can live for millennia.

Not too far from the place now called Aslan’s How, she finds the clearing with the pond, though the pond has grown so much she almost doesn’t recognize it. Surrounded by the pale, papery bark of the trees around her, she turns slowly on the spot. 

“Hello,” she whispers, looking up at them. “I don’t suppose any of you know me. But I’m here looking for someone.” And she says the Aspen’s name, her voice no louder than a breath.

The leaves rustle, whispering to each other for a long minute until slowly the sound fades. 

Lucy gulps and nods, preparing herself to turn and walk away, back to Caspian and her siblings. 

But then something happens. 

A new whisper starts, soft and echoey, as though it is being slowly drawn up from the ancient depths of the Aspen colony, and little by little it becomes audible.

Lucy gasps, her breath shuddering in her lungs, and smiles.

They’re saying her name.

**Author's Note:**

> If you have not checked out the short film Girl, Sweetvoiced, by Rebecca Shoptaw, I'd highly recommend you do so. You can find it [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xvl8HuLg0U) It stars Georgie Henley, and is where the idea for this fic was born.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading! If you'd like, please leave a comment; I always love getting feedback.


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